LEARNING UNITS INTERTWINING HI/STORIES
The “Learning Units” each present arts education histories with a different geographical and historical focus. They invite to engage with histories, to reflect on one’s own previously acquired knowledge and to re-activate historical experiences in current art and education practice. Seven topics provide orientation in the resources, allowing to follow a path connecting several learning units.
The methods proposed range from individual exercises to concepts for learning processes in groups over a whole semester. As the resources have been conceived for a wide range of different learning contexts internationally each learning unit contains guidance as to who are the specific addressees and the proposed context of use – appropriations and adaptions for other contexts are welcome!
PATHS
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# Dear interested readers and educators
By Nana Adusei-Poku After working/observing and thinking with the Another Roadmap Research teams over the period of three years, I would like to use this opportunity to emphasize the sensitivity with which each workgroup worked on their often very difficult historical material. Many of the sources, visual and textual are carefully used in the learning…
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1 – Path: Working with images
In most respects, working with images (whether still or moving) is one of the older modalities of art education, but the preponderance and sheer volume of sensate triggers that presently confront the contemporary beholder call upon much more than scanning and taking in the visual field. The learning units that take on this mode of…
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2 – Path: “The artist” – “the child” – “the native”
This path is based on research into the discursive co-constitution of the triad of “the artist” – “the child” – “the native” and its historical connections to colonialism and mechanisms of exclusion. This triad relies on a gaze which is characterized by a simultaneous act of othering and idealization: it admires those who have not…
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3 – Path: Reflexive Pedagogies/Critical Literacies
The Learning Units designed by the Kampala, Zurich and Maseru working groups emanate from different working contexts though they are related as kin in that each of them deploys exercises to encourage participants to understand that the texts and media we confront in our lives are never neutral, rather they are imbued with particular positionalities,…
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4 – Path: Missionary dimensions in Arts Education
A wholistic interrogation and analysis of the extent to which western missionary leadership and autonomy configured arts education in the Global South. These learning units explore the ways in which missionaries, though noble in their cause, were supremacist in their process. Through the research carried out by these working groups, we learn that missionary intervention…
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5 – Path: Letterwriting
How do we conceive of ‘the letter’ as both a personal and a public, collective thing? What would a letter be, if it was liberated from its literary genre? Can a song/poster/manifesto/banner be considered a letter? These Learning Units consider the losses and benefits of a letter in the expanded form. By Rangoato Hlasane FOLLOW…
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6 – Path: Critical Pedagogy and its critiques
Critical pedagogy, aiming for learning as liberation and an interrogation of societal structures, is a common reference point for engaged art educators. This path invites you to engage with a range of historical references of critical pedagogies and their relevance in current practices. The learning units, beyond introducing historical and contemporary concepts, aim to discuss…
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7 – Path: Archival Activism
As I understand it, one of the founding research aims of the Another Roadmap network was to critically assess the continuing hegemony of a colonial Westernised Arts Education and through a praxis of deconstruction, to create spaces for the imagining and the realisation of alternative paradigms, and for paying due recognition to alternatives already realised.…
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ACTIVATING ARCHIVES THROUGH RADICAL METHODS: INTERGENERATIONAL CONVERSATIONS
This Learning Unit is concerned with decolonising art educations, unlearning histories that replicate the colonial gaze, re-formatting our own art educations and a re-positioning of this canon by centring artists and cultural producers of colour. We are focused on histories of 1980s ‘Black Arts Movement’ in the United Kingdom and its impact on artists of…
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CHANGING PLACES
Art’s power to enable a reimagination of the present is behind the possibly utopic title of this Learning Unit. By inviting you to think about what could happen when visual relations are reshaped within a picture frame, we ask you to layer on a contrapuntal voice to a disempowered character now enplaced in a position…
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DECOLONISING LITERACY WITH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY
This Learning Unit is intended to provide activity plans for students or other learners in late primary to high school, though they can be shared with any group of people with moderate literacy skills. The activities may be used in classrooms or workshop settings and can be used to develop and enhance critical dimension of…
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DECONSTRUCTING THE WILD >< CHILD
This Learning Unit aims to understand whether the history of the construction of fantasy and creativity as related to the “exotic Other” still informs current methods and ideas of museum, gallery and art education practices (not only) for children – and if so, how these connections work. We propose to look at parts of this…
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DISCREPANCIES BETWEEN PAULO FREIRE’S METHOD OF CRITICAL LITERACY AND ANDEAN WORLD-VIEWS
The work itinerary that we propose in this learning unit consists of materials, texts, images and personal anecdotes that Sofía Olascoaga[1] and I gathered on a visit we made to WAMAN WASI, a center of cultural affirmation and recovery of Amazonian Andean peasant technologies in Lamas Peru. The questions we asked at the time were: How does…
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EXPERIMENTS IN INJECTING CRITICAL READINGS OF THE HISTORY OF ARTS AND DESIGN EDUCATION INTO AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE IN PUBLICATION DESIGN
This learning unit was designed for use by 1st year diploma level visual communication students at a tertiary-level art and design school in Uganda. Its aim was to introduce the students to publication design (as specified in the curriculum) while at the same time engaging them in critical readings of the history of art and…
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HOW TO WORK WITH ARCHIVES THAT ARE “NOT THERE”? ENGAGING MEDU ART ENSEMBLE IN THE NOW
This Learning Unit is concerned with the politics of archival access or how to work with archives that are ‘not there’. The central story of the Johannesburg Working Group (JWG) is the Medu Art Ensemble (Medu), a collective of informal members; most of them exiled artists from South Africa, working in Botswana circa 1979-1985.
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PEDAGOGY AND CRITICISM OF CAPITALISM IN WEST BERLIN FROM 1969
1970, West Berlin. At the height of the Cold War, three years after the revolts staged by students, particularly in Paris, Frankfurt, and (West) Berlin, the publisher Basis Verlag started calling itself a socialist collective. The name of the publisher “Basis Verlag” unmistakably refers to the Marxist pair of terms “base” and “superstructure”. Many of…
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RECONSTRUCTING THE ROUTE IMPORTATION OF GERMAN ART EDUCATIONAL IDEAS
This Learning Unit aims at helping the readers to get a glimpse of the big picture of the importation ofGerman art educational ideas to China in the early 20th century. This big picture includes the importationof Western visual arts, aesthetics and art education before 20th century and the historical, political, social-cultural context
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REENGAGING FREIRE: DECODING AND RE-CODING FREIRE’S “GENERATIVE IMAGES” AND CRITICAL ARTS EDUCATION
How do we engage students or participants of a learning programme in a gallery in discussing an artwork in a critical and potentially emancipatory manner? This Learning Unit proposes to reflect on methods for the critical reading of images by engaging with pictures for learning situations that were created following Paulo Freire’s approach of “generative…
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REENGAGING FREIRE: PAULO & ELZA IN GENEVA
How do we engage students or participants of a learning programme in a gallery in discussing an artwork in a critical and potentially emancipatory manner? This Learning Unit proposes to reflect on methods for the critical reading of images by engaging with pictures for learning situations that were created following Paulo Freire’s approach of “generative…
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REFLECTION OF PRACTICES THROUGH DIALOGUE WITH IMAGES AND WRITTEN CONVERSATIONS – ACTIVATION OF ARCHIVES OF POPULAR EDUCATION
This Learning Unit shows, with the help of a video we as Bogota Working Group produced, a possibility of how to put central concepts of Paulo Freire into a new and present context.